Abstract We present a large sample of
U-band dropout
galaxies extracted from the Canada-France deep fields survey (CFDF).
Our catalogue covers an effective area of
1700 arcmin
2
divided between three large, contiguous fields separated widely on
the sky. To
IAB=24.5, the survey contains 1294 Lyman-break
candidates, in agreement with previous measurements by other
authors, after appropriate incompleteness corrections have been
applied to our data. Based on comparisons with spectroscopic
observations and simulations, we estimate that our sample of
Lyman-break galaxies is contaminated by stars and interlopers
(lower-redshift galaxies) at no more than
. We find that
is well fitted by a power-law of fixed slope,
, even at small (
) angular separations. In
two of our three fields, we are able to fit simultaneously for both
the slope and amplitude and find
and
r0 =
(5.3+6.8-2.2)h-1 Mpc, and
and
r0
= (6.3+17.9-2.8)h-1 Mpc (all spatially dependent
quantities are quoted for a
-flat cosmology). Our data
marginally indicates in one field (at a
level) that the
Lyman-break correlation length
r0 depends on sample limiting
magnitude: brighter Lyman-break galaxies are more clustered than
fainter ones. For the entire CFDF sample, assuming a fixed
slope
we find
Mpc. Using these
clustering measurements and prediction for the dark matter density
field computed assuming cluster-normalised linear theory, we derive
a linear bias of
. Finally we show that the dependence
of the correlation length with the surface density of Lyman-break
galaxies is in good agreement with a simple picture where more
luminous galaxies are hosted by more massive dark matter halos with
a simple one-to-one correspondence.